Black

Closer home, magic takes precedence over memoir in autobiographical titles by artists such as Bhajju Shyam and Teju Behan, who draw from folk traditions. In Black: An Artist’s Tribute, Mithila artist Santosh Kumar Das describes painting images of Krishna in his childhood; pages later, the artist himself is seen on a peacock, holding up a giant pen like some divine emblem. In a final word on the subject, Das writes that the artist’s real world is a pot of black ink, the artist himself nothing more than ‘a creation of the mysteries of ink’.